Is "white" a color? (#21; Topic A)

Practically every day, one reads in the media the phrase "people of color". The phrase is supposed to be used as a polite term in opposition to "white." This begs the question: Is white a color? Does a palette have a space for a paint known as "white"? If the answer is yes, then "people of color" = "people of all colors", and the restrictive use of this term makes no sense. If the answer is no, then the opposite of "people of color" must necessarily be "people of no color" -- or, for short, "colorless people." These options are unlikely to be appealing to those who fall into this category. Is "European-Americans" an alternative? The answer is also No; the reason is that it would exclude ethnic groups such as Jews. Jews in the USA are, at least for statistical purposes, grouped as "white." Why? To boost statistics on years of education and on per-capita income for "whites" -- Jews, as do Chinese-Americans and Asian-Americans in general, have better data to show on these fronts. In actuality, what constitutes as white is but a legislative action away. In Peter Kwong and Dusanka Miscevic's 1995 book, Chinese America, in early days in USA, at least in Louisiana, Chinese were classified as "white" for census purposes. Indeed, in the early 1970s, I met a Japanese businessman in Sydney, who proudly stated to me that, in Australia, Japanese were, by law, grouped as "white." At that time, Australia still had the "White Australia" policy -- so, this is readily understandable: in a capitalistic society, in the name of the mighty Australian pound or whatever, anything is negotiable.
Posted at 9:08 am, Friday, January 6, 2006